Creating Custom Membership and Event Reports

How to pull the data you need out of your database through creating custom reports.

Written by Melisa Smith Updated over a week ago

If you love data like we do here at Novi, and you want to be able to slice and dice your data any way you want, you'll love our custom report builder!

The Novi report builder was built to give you as many options as possible, but also to be simple enough to understand. Also, know that the Novi AMS team is always available to help in Intercom should you have questions when creating your reports.

Creating Your Own Custom Reports

The main thing that you need to remember about custom reports is that there are two pieces to these, that apply to both membership reports and event reports:

Who is the report about?

What information do I need about them?

A great example to showcase comes from one of our associations who needed to create a report containing the primary contact information for companies of a certain member type.

We've recreated the report using test data so you can see how intuitive the process is.

Here's How:

1. Set Your Conditions (WHO)

You want to start by setting your conditions. In other words, answer the question of "Who do you need information about?"

This is where you will add rules or groups of rules to be able to pinpoint exactly which records should be included in your report. These rules can come from hundreds of conditions, including your member type information, custom fields, individual user information, general info about your members, and more!

Don't get confused by the conditions. Simply stop and think about what it is that you need.

2. Set Your Display Settings (WHAT)

Next, you'll set your display settings - what information do you want to gain from your report?

Click and choose a column to add to the report, click and drag to reorder, or simply click the X to remove a column.

Keep in mind that you can type in keywords to search for conditions when creating reports. You don't have to scroll through the hundreds of options to find what you need. Once you start typing, the list will start filtering.

Since our example is pulling primary contact info, you'll see that we've set the columns we want to display.

3. OPTIONAL: Group Your Data.

An optional step to take is to group your report data to organize it so that the results are shown grouped by a similarity, allowing you to further break your data down and add an extra layer of customization.

Great for grouping data together that has similarities such as being in the same city, having the same parent company, etc.

4. OPTIONAL: Sum/Average Numerical Fields.

You can also opt to sum or average numerical fields, such as employee count, to give you easy access to totals when viewing and exporting your data.

The Result

Once your conditions and display settings are set, you're ready to view your data by clicking Save & View. Print or export the specific report data for easy use and access.

Below, you'll see that we've pulled the company, the primary contact first name, last name, email and phone number.

Items of Note:

Fields not directly tied to an event cannot be pulled in Custom Event Reports.

The thing to remember about member record information and event attendee registration is that, for the most part, these live in separate places in the database. For example, if your member records have a Nickname custom field, you can not pull this custom field in a custom event report UNLESS the Nickname field was also attached to an event ticket.

Detailed financial reporting will need to come from QuickBooks.

Some basic information can be pulled in custom reports, like open dues balance, but any other more detailed financial reporting will need to come from QuickBooks. They have a robust reporting component that will allow you to pull very detailed financial reports. Don't forget, you also have your Transactions tab with basic financial info that you can filter and export. If you need to combine Novi member info with a QuickBooks report, Excel can help you combine this information.

You may see blank values in your report results.

You will often see data missing in your results, like in the example above. This simply means that the data you've asked for does not exist for that particular record in the system.

It could be that a user chose not to give their phone number, for example, or maybe there is not primary contact assigned to a record. For any concerns, review the record in question to ensure that the data matches your report.